The Story of a Life, page 29
We had no better luck with our next Russian literature teacher. Trostyansky was a tall, conceited man with a pale face. According to him, all Russia’s writers could be divided into two categories – decent men worthy of study and lower-class seditionists whose wasted talent was to be pitied and best not spoken of. Trostyansky annoyed us. In the essays we wrote for him we overthrew his gods and elevated his villains. Smiling politely, he tried to explain to us in a quiet voice that we were mistaken and gave us low marks.
Trostyansky was replaced by Selikhanovich, who taught psychology as well as Russian literature. He looked like the poet Bryusov1 and wore a black frock coat buttoned up to his chin. He was a sensitive and talented man. He ‘washed’ Russian literature before us just like expert art restorers wash old paintings. He cleaned away the dust and grime of decades’ worth of inaccurate interpretations, classroom boredom, clichés and petty judgements. Many of us were shocked at what we now saw before us – here was a literature of magnificent colours, of profound meaning, of rare truth the likes of which we had never noticed before.
We learned a great deal from Selikhanovich, and not only Russian literature. He introduced us to the Renaissance, to nineteenth-century European philosophy, to the fairytales of Hans Christian Andersen and to the poetry of The Lay of Igor, whose Old Slavonic text we had up until then just mindlessly memorised for our examinations.
Selikhanovich had rare descriptive powers. He talked about the most complex philosophical theories in such a way that made them clear and easily grasped, and he filled one with wonder at the enormous powers of the human mind. Philosophers, writers, scholars and poets, whose names had meant nothing to us other than a string of dates and ‘Services to Humanity’ to be memorised, became living people. Selikhanovich showed us that they had never existed on their own but had belonged to concrete historical epochs.
In his lectures on Gogol, Selikhanovich conjured up for us the Rome of his time – its streets, hills and ruins, its artists and carnivals, its very air and the blue of its sky. A line of amazing men and women all connected to Rome and its history paraded before our eyes, brought to life by a magic power that was both simple and available to everyone. This power was nothing other than knowledge, passion and imagination.
We passed from one epoch to another, from one interesting place to another. Through the study of literature, Selikhanovich took us everywhere – from the armouries of Tula to the Cossack outposts on the border with Dagestan, from a drizzly autumn day at Boldino to the orphanages and debtors’ prisons of Dickensian England, from the markets of Paris to Chopin’s sick bed in an ancient monastery on the island of Majorca, and even to lonely Taman where the sea wind rustled through the fields of maize.
We loved learning about the lives of those writers who had taught us so much about our country and the world and our notions of beauty – Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Herzen, Ryleev,2 Chekhov, Dickens, Balzac and so many others. All this knowledge filled us with pride in the power of the human spirit and of art.
Along the way, Selikhanovich taught us other things as well, such as manners and tact. He liked to pose problems. ‘A few people are sitting in a room,’ he once said. ‘All the chairs are occupied. A woman walks in. You can see she’s been crying. What should a gentleman do?’
We replied that he must of course get up and offer her his chair.
‘And what would someone who was both polite and tactful do?’ he asked.
We had no idea.
‘Give her the chair with its back to the light so her eyes aren’t so clearly visible,’ said Selikhanovich.
What astonished me about Selikhanovich was what he said upon learning of my wish to become a writer: ‘Do you have the perseverance for it?’
I hadn’t thought of it as a necessary trait in being a writer. Later I learned that he had been right.
One day he stopped me in the corridor and said: ‘Come to Balmont’s lecture tomorrow.3 It’s imperative that if you want to write prose you must know poetry as well.’
I went to Balmont’s lecture. The title was ‘Poetry as Magic’. It was hot and crowded inside the Merchants’ Assembly. The candles of two bronze candelabras burned on a small table covered with a green velvet cloth.
Balmont came out. He was wearing a frock coat with a flowing silk tie. A humble camomile peeped out of the hole on his lapel. His thinning yellowish hair fell in soft curls around his collar. He fixed his eyes on a point over our heads in a manner that was both mysterious and haughty. Balmont was no longer a young man. He spoke in a slow, leisurely voice. After every sentence he paused and listened to his own words, like a pianist with a foot on the loud pedal listening to the vibration of a chord.
After the interval Balmont recited some of his verse. It seemed to me that his poems contained all that wondrous musicality of the Russian language –
In the deserted woods, a cuckoo cries tenderly,
So full of longing, of strangeness, the sound of its entreaty.
Springtime, to me, at once mournful and happy,
And the beauty of this world an unexpected glory.
He spoke with his small reddish beard pointed up to the ceiling, and his words broke over the auditorium in waves –
Like some distant patter of feet, I catch a murmur outside my window,
A strange, unintelligible whispering – the whispering of raindrops.
Balmont finished. The pendants of the chandeliers vibrated from the applause. He raised a hand, and everyone fell silent. ‘I am going to read to you “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe,’ he said. ‘But first I want to tell you a story which shows how fate is, at times, kind to us poets. When Poe died and was buried in Baltimore, his relatives erected an unbelievably heavy tombstone over his grave. These Godfearing Quakers, so it seems, wanted to be certain that the poet’s rebellious spirit remained in the grave and had no chance of coming back to disturb the peace of honest hard-working Americans. But when they placed this stone on Poe’s grave, it broke. And so it lies there to this very day, and every spring pansies grow in the cracks of this stone.’
Balmont began to read ‘The Raven’. The gloomy splendour of the poem filled the hall. It was as if we had magically left Kiev for some dark, snow-covered plain buffeted by a howling wind. The iron clang of ‘Nevermore’ fell into the emptiness of that night like the striking of a tower clock.
‘Nevermore!’ His mind could not accept it. Nevermore? Would Virginia nevermore walk the earth and would she nevermore knock lightly, shyly on the heavy door? Would there nevermore be youth, love and happiness? ‘Nevermore!’ cawed the raven, and this little forgotten man, this great American poet, shrank from loneliness in his worn armchair and looked with the eyes of a sick child into the cold abyss.
All my life I have been grateful to Selikhanovich for awakening my love of poetry. It was poetry that revealed to me the richness of language. In verse words were reborn, they acquired their full power. The enormous world of poetic imagery entered into my consciousness as if a blindfold had been removed from my eyes.
While Selikhanovich was introducing us to literature and philosophy, old man Klyachin was opening our eyes to the history of western Europe. Thin, with a bulging Adam’s apple, screwed-up and rather weak eyes, always unshaven and his frock coat unbuttoned, Klyachin spoke in a hoarse voice. He spat out his words in quick, short bursts, like lumps of clay, which he used to create lifelike statues of Danton, Babeuf, Marat, Napoleon, Louis-Philippe, Gambetta. We could hear the indignation in his throat when he talked about the coup of 9 Thermidor or the treachery of Thiers. He would get so carried away he’d light a cigarette and then catch himself and immediately put it out on the closest desk.
Klyachin was an authority on the French Revolution. That a school like ours even tolerated such a teacher was something of a mystery. Sometimes he became so overcome with emotion it seemed that he had forgotten he was talking to a group of schoolboys and not the deputies of the National Convention. He was a living anachronism and at the same time the most progressive of all our teachers. At times he seemed to us to be the last of the Montagnards – an ancient creature who had miraculously lived to a hundred and ended up in Kiev. Somehow, he had escaped the guillotine and death in the swamps of Guyana and not lost an ounce of his burning fervour.
Once in a while Klyachin was too tired to talk about the revolution, and so he talked to us about Paris in those times – the streets and buildings, the type of lamps they used to light the squares at night, what the women wore, the songs sung by the common folk, what the newspapers looked like. Hearing him talk, many of us wished we could go back a hundred years and see for ourselves those great events which he had described to us.
1 Valery Bryusov (1873–1924), Symbolist poet and writer.
2 Kondraty Ryleev (1795–1826), poet and leader of the Decembrist Revolt of 1825.
3 Konstantin Balmont (1867–1942), Symbolist poet, translator of Poe’s ‘The Raven’.
34
A Shot in the Theatre
The polished parquet in the Assembly Hall was like a calm lake reflecting blue rows of schoolboys, in bright-buttoned uniforms, and flickering chandeliers. A low murmur reverberated in the hall and then died suddenly. In walked a short colonel with pale, protruding eyes, his spurs jangling. He stopped and stared at us. There came the brassy sound of bugles. We stood to attention.
The colonel – Nicholas II – was followed by a tall, thin woman, nodding left and right, in a stiff white dress and an enormous hat sprouting ostrich feathers. The woman’s face was lifeless, malicious and beautiful. It was Empress Alexandra.
Behind the empress in single file came their daughters. They had thin pale lips and were wearing equally stiff white dresses. The dresses didn’t crease or fold as they walked and looked as if they had been made of cardboard. Following the little girls – the grand duchesses – waddled an enormous lady, rustling loudly in a lilac dress with black lace and a satin sash across her chest, a gold-rimmed pince-nez on the tip of her nose – old Lady in Waiting Naryshkina. The fat bulged over her tight silks. She fanned herself with a little lace handkerchief.
So began the centenary celebration of our gymnasium.
The royal suite blocked our view of Nicholas. All we could see was the carefully plastered hair around the ministers’ bald spots, scarlet ribbons, white trousers with gold braid, patent leather shoes held tightly in place with foot straps, the generals’ sharovary and silver sashes.
Nedelsky, our school’s finest elocutionist, welcomed the tsar with a poem of his own composition. He spoke in a loud, dry voice and addressed the tsar with the informal ‘ty’. Then the suite parted, leaving a wide passage through which Nicholas approached us. He stopped, rubbed his light brown beard and said slowly and with a slight burr: ‘Greetings, gentlemen.’
We answered – distinctly but not too loudly – as we had been instructed: ‘We wish Your Imperial Majesty good health!’
Being the shortest boy in the top form, I was standing at the end of my row. Nicholas came up to me. His cheek twitched slightly. He gave me a distracted look and smiled, but only with his eyes. ‘What’s your name?’
I answered.
‘Are you Ukrainian?’
‘Yes, Your Majesty.’
He looked me over with a brief, bored glance and moved on to my neighbour. He stopped to ask each of us our names. A concert followed the inspection. Since the tsar listened standing up, so did we.
Nicholas made it quite clear that he was bored with the gala reception and had no intention of wasting his time on some school concert. He kept plucking impatiently at the glove he had removed from his right hand. The concert was cut short. The school orchestra played ‘Glory, Glory to Our Russian Tsar’, someone recited the ‘Song of Oleg’ and the choir sang a cantata.
The whole event was boring and pointless. The ministers yawned behind the tsar’s back. It was too painful to watch the musicians, who were quaking with fear, so we watched the ministers and the rest of the suite instead. We were shocked by the difference between the tsar and the men around him. Nicholas looked plain and even a bit awkward. He was lost amid his large suite that flashed and gleamed in their silver and gold, in their tall polished boots, epaulettes, sword knots, spurs, pelisses and medals. Even when the courtiers stood still, a faint ringing could be heard from all their regalia and weaponry.
Nicholas listened to the concert with a stony expression and then left. He was not satisfied. He had a score to settle with our school. Two days earlier a former pupil named Bogrov had shot Minister Stolypin in the Opera House, mortally wounding him. Of this I shall say more later.
On our centenary it had been decided to promote the school from the rank of a ‘gymnasium’ to that of a ‘lycée’. An edict to that effect had been prepared. But after the shooting in the theatre it was no longer deemed fitting for a gymnasium that had turned out political criminals to be granted the special privileges and prestige of a lycée. And so instead our school received nothing more than a new name – the Imperial Alexander Gymnasium, in honour of Emperor Alexander I – and a new coat of arms with a large ‘A’ and crown. The boys at Kiev’s other gymnasia liked to make fun of our rather pompous new coat of arms, which led to more than a few brawls. We boys in the top form refused to change our old school badges for the new ones. The school officials objected, but we insisted that we didn’t have the money for new badges and buckles. In the end, the officials let the matter go. We just weren’t worth the effort considering we would soon be leaving school.
All sorts of festivities were arranged in honour of Nicholas’s visit to Kiev. An ugly bronze statue of Alexander II was unveiled and even uglier plaster statues of Saint Olga and Saints Cyril and Methodius. Military manoeuvres were conducted on the outskirts of the city. Everywhere one looked there were inaugurations, pageants, processions, ceremonial illuminations. Flags hung from every house and building for the whole week of the tsar’s stay.
After a horse race, the boys and girls from all Kiev’s gymnasia were paraded around the track. We kicked up a cloud of dust as we passed in front of Nicholas. The setting sun was in our eyes. We couldn’t see a thing and mixed up our ranks. A military band blew with all its might. Our school distinguished itself by forgetting to acknowledge the tsar’s greeting. A full general in the army galloped up and gave us a dressing down. His chestnut steed had flattened its ears and stamped angrily as the general jerked at the reins.
A gala performance was planned for the Opera House which Nicholas would be attending. Boys and girls in the top forms from a number of schools, including ours, were also invited. We were led up a dark back stairway to the gallery and locked in. We could not leave and go down to the lower tiers. A few decent but rather brazen police officers were stationed at the doors. When some pretty schoolgirl wanted to get out of the gallery, they’d give each other a sly wink and let her pass.
I was sitting in the back row and couldn’t see a thing. It was very hot. My head practically touched the ceiling. Not until the interval was I able to push my way up to the front. I leaned over the railing and looked out into the hall. It was veiled in a light haze through which I made out flashes of colour from the reflection of so many diamonds and jewels. The imperial box was empty; Nicholas and the rest of the royal family had moved to the avant-loge.
Ministers and courtiers were standing by the railing separating the hall from the orchestra pit. I stood looking down and listening to the murmur of voices. The musicians in their black frock coats were sitting in front of their music stands but none of them were bothering to tune their instruments as usual. Suddenly, there was a loud crack. The musicians jumped to their feet. There was another crack. I didn’t realise it was gunshots. The boys standing beside me shouted: ‘Look! He fell right on the floor!’
‘Who?’
‘Stolypin. Right there, next to the railing!’
I looked. The theatre was now strangely quiet. By the railing a tall man with a bushy black beard and a sash over his shoulder was sitting on the floor. He was grasping at the railing as if he wanted to grab hold and pull himself up. The space around Stolypin was empty.
A young man in a tail-coat was walking away from Stolypin towards the exit. I couldn’t see his face from where I stood. All I noticed was that he was in no hurry and walked calmly. Someone began to scream. There was a thud. An officer had jumped out of the lower boxes and grabbed the young man by the arm. They were immediately surrounded by a crowd.
‘Everyone out of the gallery!’ I heard one of the policemen say behind me.
They hurried us out into the corridor. The doors to the hall were closed. We stood there with no idea what was happening. We could hear a muffled hum coming from the hall. It died down, and then the orchestra played ‘God Save the Tsar’.
‘He’s killed Stolypin,’ Fitsovsky whispered to me.
‘No talking! Leave the theatre at once!’ shouted a police officer.
We went down the same dark set of stairs and out into the brightly lit square. The square was empty. Lines of mounted police were moving the crowds outside the theatre away and down into the side streets, farther and farther back. The horses stamped their feet nervously, the sound echoing down the streets and filling the square. A bugle sounded. An ambulance carriage drove into the square at a swinging trot and stopped in front of the theatre. A few medical orderlies jumped out and raced up the steps carrying a stretcher.
We began to leave the square. We walked slowly because we wanted to see what would happen next. The police tried to move us along, but they looked so confused themselves that we didn’t bother to pay them any attention. We saw Stolypin carried out on a stretcher. The orderlies placed him inside the carriage, and then they took off down Vladimirskaya Street with a police escort galloping alongside.
